Hacker News Reader

Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

During some of the worst starvation events in the 20th century, it was still only on the order of ~10 million people that died. And most of those deaths were because horrific totalitarian governments prevented outside aid to the affected regions.

I have not seen evidence that there will be food system collapse driven by climate change that would be worse than those events, but my ears are open if you have some.

View on HN

There is one absolutely massive one, and that's that for the first time the problem is truly global. Other famines have been caused either by war or local droughts, both of which affect only a population in a limited area and crucially, can be somewhat mitigated by importing food from elsewhere. You can't import food if there are global food shortages.

> I have not seen evidence that there will be food system collapse driven by climate change that would be worse than those events

Doing my best to not come off condescending here in case you are being sincere, but the comparison of totalitarian gov crackdowns and local drought are not exactly comparable to an almost worldwide heat increase and less water availability for key high density areas... Once countries have to start hoarding their resources and other countries run out of resources, things will not be good and there's plenty of data, studies and articles out there discussing this that are not hard to find.

If you are being sincere, apologies, but living in the US lately has shown a level of bad actors trying to grift that's made it really difficult to be patient with climate change denial/dismissiveness.

If you think that these very vague suggestions come across as some sort of strong critique of me, don't worry. I don't think you have provided any sort of refutation of me, and you certainly do not exhibit much understanding of what, say, 2 degrees of change will looks like.

If you have any papers, please share. If you have sections of the IPCC to point to, please share. I am very sincere, in all my comments. But if you can't point to actual scientific documents, then you're doing no better than the climate denialists.

Took 2 minutes of Googling and little effort to provide these 2 of 10+ articles that immediately popped up. So, you are fully aware you could have found these easily but were putting out "pRoVe It" energy for whatever reason.

https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/climate-change-cuts...

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2018/07/25/climate-change-...

> “If the climate warms by 3 degrees, that’s basically like everyone on the planet giving up breakfast.” That’s a high cost for a world where more than 800 million people at times go a day or more without food because of inadequate access.

The numbers in those articles are exactly in line with everything I have ever seen on the topic. That you think they contradict what I'm saying makes me think that either you're completely misreading me or the articles.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com